Court Rules Pirate Bay UK Block

Five of the UK's big Internet service providers (ISP) have been ordered by the High Court to block torrent search site The Pirate Bay, after it was found to be infringing the copyright of many artists.

While only Virgin has so far announced its compliance, Sky, TalkTalk, Everything Everywhere (formerly Orange and T-Mobile) and O2 have also been ordered to place the block on TPB.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is rather pleased with this result, with chief executive Geoff Taylor saying: "The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale.

"Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them."

Mr Taylor fails to realise however that The Pirate Bay merely provides magnet links to torrents, which in turn connect users to one another, allowing the sharing of files. Technically, the only people infringing copyright are the users that upload and seed copyright protected content. Much in the same way that Google indexes The Pirate bay pages that link to these torrents that link to these files, TPB is just a search and linking tool.

The BPI also seems to have forgotten the NewzBin2 fiasco, that saw the music sharing site blocked by major ISPs. However, within days users had found methods to circumvent the block, rendering it completely useless.

And what about the many, many artists legitimately using The Pirate Bay to distribute their music? Dan Bull's Bye Bye BPI song was promoted by TPB service Promo Bay, which allows the homepage of the very popular site to be taken over by an unsigned artist's video or song.

While Mr Taylor might publicly claim his organisation is defending the rights of artists, as has been made very clear many times over, there are a lot of musicians who don't even remotely feel represented by the BPI and blocks like this are not what they want.

By attempting to protect the organisation's own interests and that of its artists, the BPI is doing more harm to unsigned acts than the owners of TPB themselves.